Timing: When to apply

The entire process takes about a year from start to
finish.
Your first chance to fail is applying too late.

Submit your applications early in the fall (October/November) of the year prior to which
you want to begin employment.
Piles of new applications are often sorted during committee meetings.
Early on, there are fewer applications, so early applications get a little more attention.

The middle of January is when most schools stop accepting
applications, but nearly all of my applications submitted near the
deadline bounced.
Even so, keep submitting to any position you find through February,
particularly if someone there recommends you apply. (I applied for
the position I took in early February.)

You will probably hear back with invitations for interviews in
January and February, but sometimes even March and April.

You'll want to draft your research statement, teaching statement and
curriculum vitæ (CV) the summer before your search.
For reference, I archived copies of my materials at the end of my job search:

Get your letter writers primed as early as possible. You'll need
at most six letter writers, but no less than three. You'll want to
ask them at least a month in advance, and forward them copies
of your CV, research statement and teaching statement. Keep track of
the schools you've applied to with instructions for letter-writers on a
web site. Email them each time you apply to a school and update
it.

Interviews seem to run from late February through early May, with
a spike in March.

My guess is that the bulk of the offers come in April.

Some years, your field will be in high demand, and in others, no one
will be looking. Have a backup plan (postdoc, industrial lab,
start-up) to weather a bad year or two for your field. (I weathered a
rough year for my field doing start-ups. It paid the
bills, I had a lot of fun, and I think this had a
net-positive impact on my candidacy. I had to make it
crystal clear, however, that I would completely unwind myself from
these commitments upon taking a professorship.)

Books and reading

An academic job search is somewhat like a tightly choreographed ritual
dance between candidates and schools.
I highly recommend doing some reading on this ritual before you embark on the process.
The following books helped me the most.

Even a Geek Can Speak.
My first job talk went over like a turd in
the sink.
I read this in an afternoon and then reworked the presentation; my
subsequent talks nailed it.
It covers everything from audience to message to slides to minimizing
pre-talk nerves.

Tomorrow's Professor. I used this largely for figuring out how to write a cover letter, research statement and teaching statement.
Several grad students have thanked me for pointing them to this book.
My wife signed up for the Tomorrow's Professor listserv and forwarded me all the
relevant posts.

A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science details the grad-student-to-junior-faculty transformation.
With respect to the job search, it covers aspects like how to
present yourself in writing, and how to present yourself while
speaking.
Several grad students have told me they wish they had read this much
sooner in their academic careers.

Your application materials

You'll find that Tomorrow's Professor has good general advice on composing
your job materials: cover letter, CV, research statement and teaching
statement.
Google and ask around for other folks' job materials in your area.
Your professional web site is an unofficial fifth application
document, since people will type your name into Google.

Create a simple, elegant and straightforward professional web site
with your job materials and publications.

Put a high-quality, professional-but-not-cheesy-looking
photograph of yourself on your site. (Try black-and-white or sepia
tone filters.)
Don't be surprised when this photo shows up on posters.

According to Google
analytics, visitors coming from academic
institutions had the following page-view distribution during the period
of my job search:

Main site: 69%

CV: 18%

Research statement: 10%

Teaching statement: 3%

Numbers are rounded to nearest whole percentile.
From this, it seems that your CV is your most important document.
(And yet, I put far more effort into my research statement!)

Post your job materials in HTML in addition to PDF. (Well over
99% of all the people that looked at my materials looked at the HTML
version of my job materials.) PDF is great for printing, but it's
cumbersome for online viewing. For those using LaTeX, try HEVEA.

Keep updating your materials throughout your search and post them on your web site.
Many of your interviewers will go to your site minutes before meeting you and download the latest version.

This wasn't a problem for me, but if I were not in the top hits for my
name on Google, I would consider taking out AdWords on my name.

Many schools will ask for your top three to five publications. If you
don't have at least three good publications, you may want to
consider a postdoc.

List acceptance rate information (number submitted, number accepted,
percent accepted, authorship ranking) on your publications in your CV.
This gives people outside your field (like the search chair) a crude
metric to judge the worth of your publications. (Warning: Someone I
trust said listing this information can make a candidate look like a
bean counter that's missing the forest for the trees: the point of
academia is not to publish papers; the point is impact.)

Take the time (at least one hour) to personalize the content of
each cover letter. (I tried to work in the names of the faculty
members at each school qualified to judge my application.)

Bold face faculty member names in the cover letter.
Hiring packets are skimmed very quickly when they come in, so
this boosts the chances of your packet being routed to the
appropriate person.

Keep your cover letter brief (one or two paragraphs at most) and
free of extraneous information.

Have people outside your area read over your materials.
Politely ask a previous search chair at your school to read them.

Go to a major conference in your field before November (at the latest)
of the year of your search and ask who's hiring.

Post your job materials (research statement, teaching statement, CV)
on your web site as soon as possible.
Several people in my field looking to download my papers found out I
was looking for a job and asked me to apply to their schools. I
ended up with interviews at all of them.

Schools seem to interview about seven candidates on average for each
position. I got an interview at just under half the schools I applied
to. Assume you're an average candidate, decide on the probability
you'd like to get a job offer and use these odds to solve for
how many schools you have to apply to.
Double that number.
Getting one offer is good, but a second offer gives you
leverage when negotiating.

Don't rule out a school because you don't know much about it or
because you presume it wouldn't be very good.
(After my job trek, I realized that there are a lot of great schools I
never knew about. I've never put much stock in the U.S. Newsrankings before,
but they seemed entirely out of line after my job search.)

A good academic job talk

One department chair told me,
"Your packet got you the interview.
Your job talk gets you the job."
I found the job talk set the tone for the entire interview.
Unfortunately, you will screw it up the first time you give it.

Your job talk is unlike any talk you have given so far:

The audience must understand it.

The audience must be excited by it.

The audience must like you enough to want you to hang around for at least six years afterward.

Defend the department's field by starting
very general.
What are the pressing problems of the department's field?
What are the long-term trends?
Spend as much as 10
minutes on general, easily accessible material.
Use charts, statistics, anecdotes, quotes, video clips and animations.
Demonstrate to those outside your field that you at least understand
the pressing issues and that your research will be relevant.
(I chose to highlight the need for verification,
security and parallelism.)

Defend your field: How does your sub-field address the
important issues?

Defend your work: How has your work specifically impacted those
issues?

In deciding what the important issues facing your field are, you may
want to start with your work and back-solve for what the "most" important
issues are.

Every field in science and engineering has camps at two poles:
theory and experimentation, so strike a balance. Make it clear you
understand the theory and do some sexy math, but don't bludgeon the
audience. Make it clear you can be applied and empirical with a few
charts and benchmarks. (Once I got to my research---halfway through
my talk--I toggled back and forth between little bites of theory and
charts of the empirical ramifications.)

You may have to cover lots of background material that you
wouldn't normally cover. That's fine--especially when you consider
that your talk is also used to measure your teaching ability. (I
worried that I had scaled down my material to the point of looking
obvious or unsophisticated, and yet many people outside my field told
me my talk stretched their technical limits. Each time I gave the
talk, I made the technical portions simpler, and each time, I still
got that comment. It's difficult to remember that even the mundane
concepts we use in our sub-fields every day once took a semester or
more to master.)

Don't cover all of your work in detail. Only cover one slice of your
most important easy-to-understand work in detail.

Expect people to ask questions during your talk.

During one-on-one interviews, ask people for blunt honesty and
feedback on your talk.

A little polite self-deprecating humor helps sell you as a person.

Ask your local contacts how to spin your talk to exploit the department's poles.

Interviewing

Don't let the one-on-one interviews be one way. Ask people to explain their research
to you. Engage them as much as possible. I really enjoyed getting to
hear more about other fields after four years of Ph.D. school, during
which I'd become ever more narrowly focused on my own.

I can't/didn't make your talk; can you give me a quick overview of your research?

Do you have a teaching preference?

Where else are you interviewing? (Answer honestly. Folks are just curious.)

Where do you see your research going?

Say something to prove to me that your research/field is going to matter.

Do you have any more questions?

Do you think you could apply your research to X? (Yes, you can!)

Do you think you could apply X to your research? (Yes, you can!)

At the end of each interview, the ideal situation is to have them thinking,
"Wow, s/he's a pleasant, smart person. It looks like we'd have
interesting things to talk about, and we might even be able to
collaborate."

Negotiating and start-up packages

Don't shy away from negotiating once you have an offer.
But, keep in mind that your goal is not to milk the school for
everything you can get.
Your goal is to enable a plan that bootstraps your research career to
the point where you can acquire external grant funding and then get
tenure.

Don't negotiate salary, and never name a number.
Just say you'll accept any "competitive" offer if asked.
If a school doesn't offer a competitive salary, consider what this
says about the culture of the administration.
Exception: If you've already received an offer you deem competitive,
feel free to reveal it, and they will probably want to beat it.

The Chronicle of Higher
Education has a salary
survey. Bear in mind that the average salary for a given field
can be much higher or lower than what the survey says, since the
survey lumps the lower-paying fields with higher-paying
fields.

Do negotiate your start-up funds, but don't argue for an amount.
Argue for a concrete plan of action for the amount you request.
You'll need to ask about overhead and the annual cost of a grad
student to calculate the amount for the plan. Use a spreadsheet.
Think of it as a mini grant proposal.
Consider grad students, equipment, travel and summer salary support.

I lamented the dismal state of grant acceptance rates to
argue why I needed so much initial support.
I said it would probably take me two years to get grant funding in the worst case. (It took me exactly two years.)
Aim high, and provide a diplomatic out for them with "If you think
this plan is too aggressive, let me know, and I'll work on scaling it
back."

Ask for a first-semester break on teaching so you can move,
unpack, bring your research up to speed and apply for grants.

Useful gadgets and software

Some gadgets and software made the job search process smoother and
more productive.

Store your presentation on a USB drive in every conceivable
format: PPT, Keynote, PDF, PS, HTML and Flash.
Also keep these in a hidden directory on your personal web site.
Don't leave yourself at the mercy of your laptop or the TSA.

One thing I noticed from watching other job talks (and from reading
Even a Geek Can Speak) is that presenters tethered to their
laptops or podiums during a presentation come across as less engaging.
A good presentation remote frees you up to move about the room, touch the
screen and express yourself.
(A bad presentation remote will inexplicably exit your slide-show or
jump to the end (or beginning) of your talk because you pressed the
wrong button.)
I strongly recommend the
Kensington:

This unassuming remote has actually won awards from IDSA (and deservedly so).
It's compact and ergonomic. It runs on easy-to-find AAA batteries. It has a laser pointer.
And, it's just too simple to screw up while you're in front of an
audience.
I bring it to every conference I attend, and invariably, I make friends by lending it out to presenters that have forgotten their remotes.

If interviewing in a foreign country, don't forget to bring a universal power converter.
If you do forget it, ask the hotel front desk if you can borrow one.

Buy a power splitter for airports.
The time you spend in airports while on the interview circuit may be measured in days, especially
with foreign interviews and long lay-overs.
Most of the available power outlets in airports seem to be taken as
soon as they free up.
I got frustrated with not being able to work in airports, so I bought an inexpensive, lightweight, compact travel power splitter:

This made my time in airports a lot more productive.

I spent a lot of time tweaking my slides on planes, so the Apple airplane power adapter was handy:

Look underneath your seat the next time you're on a plane; you'll probably find a funky-looking power plug that you can fit this into.
This was invaluable on international flights, and it worked on about half of my domestic flights.
I think other laptop manufacturers offer these now too.

My wife convinced me that my job talk was the appropriate time
to dump LaTeX and Beamer in favor of a "real" presentation tool. I switched to
Apple iWork's Keynote.
What surprised me was that my slide-show took less time to create than with
LaTeX, and I had a lot of fun putting together animations for my
research.
I inserted video of expensive rockets exploding
to showcase the cost of software bugs.
I think the dynamism in my slides helped sell my research
program.
If you want to make Keynote look like a fancier version of Beamer, you can install the iconic
Computer Modern fonts for use with math.

Finally, I'd recommend having a GPS-enabled smartphone if you'll be navigating in new cities.
While you're in each city, go out and explore with impunity.
Ask yourself: "Could I actually live here?"

Nuggets of general advice

Many of these nuggets were given to me and either worked or seemed sensible,
so I'm forwarding them on.

Actively involve your significant other in every step so that they
feel like they have ownership of the final decision.

Learn how to pick a wine for dinner; if you're caught in a pinch,
ask for a house recommendation.

When people ask your food preference, they're really asking if you
have any food aversions. You'd love to try any local favorites.

Dress like a professor, not an investment banker, or worse, a
grad student. For guys: No black business suits. No pin-stripes.
No T-shirts. Try: Plaid, tweed, corduroy, or camel hair coats. Shirt
with collar underneath. Tie if and only if tucked under a sweater or
a vest. And, don't forget to wear a belt. And, no white socks.

If interviewing across an ocean, see if you can arrive two full days
prior to your interview. (My first interview began less than 24 hours
after I arrived in Germany, and I was jet-lagged out of my mind during
my entire visit. My brain felt like porridge during technical exchanges,
and I couldn't even articulate the details of papers where I was the
solo author.)

If you apply to a school outside of the country, clear up visa
and passport issues in the Fall, so there's no risk of a bureaucratic
delay tanking your interview.
Check your passport's
expiration date now, and make sure you're up-to-date on entry and re-entry
requirements.

Rest up. Interviews and travel are physically, mentally and
emotionally exhausting. (My immune system quit toward the end of
my interviewing schedule. I was very ill for two weeks straight, and
I ended up canceling my two remaining interviews.)

The day of or morning after your interview, email everyone you
spoke with a short, personalized thank you note.

Don't completely overlook industry. (From a tenured professor that
had an offer from Google in 2000.)

Interview at a throw-away school first to test out your job talk
and build up canned responses. (I really under-performed at my first
interview, and I did it at a place I respected. Oops.) The next
interview will always be better than your last.

If the school sets you up in a roundtable/firing squad, take command
and start by asking for everyone's name and elevator pitch. Try hard
to ask a question or make a positive comment after each person
speaks. (This was very difficult for me because I'm a far more
reflective thinker than a real-time thinker, but I was able to respond
to all but two people among the seventy or so I met in
roundtables.)

Have your "Over the next five years, I see myself..." elevator pitch
rehearsed and ready to fire. No more than 60 seconds. One or two
sentences if possible.

Be prepared for productivity to grind to a halt for two months
during interview season.
Don't be dissertating, defending, marrying or having babies.

After or during your interview, make it very clear to the
dean/director/chair that you really liked his/her school, and that
you're looking forward to hearing from them.